Ashley College

We’ve partnered with the extraordinary team at Ashley College to explore the use of VR and 360 films in a variety of contexts at the school.

Ashley College is short term interim provision for students who have not managed to stay in mainstream education due to their health needs. The children and young people often have complex medical conditions, mental health and emotional disorders and can be highly vulnerable. We met the head teacher of Ashley College whilst demonstrating a 360 tour we had created for a Tier 4 residential mental health unit and we soon began discussing the many ways we envisaged VR being of benefit to her students. Within a short period of time, we’d begun training their staff on the use of Oculus Go VR headsets and developing a programme to use VR as part of the school’s existing regular mindfulness sessions.

We have also created a 360 degree interactive tour of the school, to enable new pupils to visit the school virtually, to help ease their anxiety about attending a new college, and we’re creating a 360 guide to public transport for current pupils - again, with a view to reducing anxiety about potentially stressful situations.

This, along with our work with the Children’s Society, shows one of the many practical ways that VR or 360 video can be helpful for young people with anxiety. Often, anxiety will be felt most strongly at times of transition - say, starting a new school, or moving to a new area - and this is linked to uncertainty, new experiences, people and places. VR allows us to help mitigate this worry about the unknown, by allowing a young person to experience a place virtually before visiting in real life, or trying out a new experience in a safe, controllable way before moving onto doing it for real (if appropriate).